Access time is the relative time it
takes for the drive to move from one spot of the disk to
another. Obviously, the lower this is the better. Both
drives are relatively equal and on-par with other disks of
their size. Minute differences in access times aren't going
to dramatically affect performance, but are often indicative
of how well the drive can perform overall.

Burst Speeds

Both of these drives were able to make
good use of the SATA interface, giving pretty standard burst
speeds for drives this large. They tend to score higher than
other desktop drives of smaller size, which is to be
expected. In real-life situations this does not help much as
this speed can only be sustained for short durations of time
for small segments of data.

Average Read

Seagate

55.2

WD

56.9

Burst Read

Seagate

133MB/sec

WD

140MB/sec

Buffered Read

Seagate

61.33

WD

60.82

Average Write

Sequential

Random

Seagate

58

49

WD

61

45

Buffered Write

Seagate

101

WD

100

CPU Utilization

All operations to the disk consume CPU
time. The less time the CPU needs to deal with the disk, the
better. Especially in resource intensive processes such as
video encoding or high end gaming, the more CPU a disk uses
for file operations, the more it can degrade system
performance.

CPU Utilization

Average

Minimum

Peak

Seagate

2.00%

1.17%

2.89%

WD

2.00%

1.45%

3.11%

Sequential (Sustained) Read

This is perhaps the most significant and
important aspect of a drive. On a disk that has the files
organized properly, sequential read has a big impact on how
long the OS will take to boot, how long applications will
take to open, how fast you can read large files such as
during an encoding process and how quickly a game takes to
load new content while running. Typically, you see more
degradation as you move towards the end of the disk. Both of
these drives saw lower speeds than I expected, dipping into
the upper 30s. This may have to do with the fact that they
are 4-platter designs, when most desktop hard drives are 3.
With a lower data density, the spread between data at the
end of the disk is even more pronounced. However, even at
the low end, they are still on par with a typical 80GB 7200
RPM SATA drive.